The present invention relates to a radio selective calling receiver and, more particularly, to a radio selective calling receiver which expands the display area in accordance with a message contained in a call signal.
With the remarkable recent advances in radio selective calling receivers, a wide variety of services have been required. Demands have also arisen for radio selective calling receivers capable of displaying messages constituted by icons, kanji characters, and the like (to be referred to as graphic information hereinafter) and messages constituted by alphabetic characters, kana characters, numbers, symbols, and the like (to be referred to as general messages hereinafter). Messages themselves tend to increase in length. On the other hand, a radio selective calling receiver of this type is required to be reduced in size and weight owing to the manner it is used, and hence the display area of the display section constituted by an LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) for displaying messages has its own limit.
In a conventional radio selective calling receiver of this type, when the number of characters/numbers of display information is large, the information cannot be displayed collectively within the limited display area and overflows. To solve this problem, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2-1041 discloses a technique of transferring part of display information which is to be displayed on a predetermined message display area to another display area so as to display the information collectively.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2-1041 discloses an electronic device having a display section constituted by a dot matrix display section and a segment display section. In this electronic device, when numerical information exceeding a predetermined number of characters is to be displayed as a message on the segment display section, only the numerical information corresponding to the predetermined number of characters is displayed on the segment display section, and the overflow of the numerical information exceeding the predetermined number of characters is temporarily stored in a memory. A key input section is then operated to input a display switching instruction so as to convert the numerical information which has already been displayed on the segment display section into dot matrix display information and transfer it to the dot matrix display section, thereby displaying it. Subsequently, the overflow of the numerical information is read out from the memory to be displayed on the segment display portion on which no information is displayed. With this operation, the numerical information, which cannot be displayed collectively on the segment display section, is displayed collectively.
According to the above conventional message display scheme, a display switching instruction is used to transfer numerical information displayed on the segment display section to the matrix display section and display the overflow of the numerical information on the segment display section. Therefore, the key input section must be operated to input the display switching instruction, requiring a cumbersome operation.
In addition, this scheme demands a memory for temporarily storing numerical information overflowing the segment display section, and a data converter for converting segment display information into matrix display information, interfering with reductions in size, weight, and cost.